Three Good Questions (and some answers)
Last month I invited you to imagine that while doing some historical research you’d found a piece in the Illustrated London News from 4th February 1865 about fortresses on the Indus River. What could you learn from it? How many research rabbit holes would it lead you down? In what new directions might it take your writing? And, if you interrogated the words and images closely, what Three Good Questions would you want answers to first?
You can refer back to the full transcript of the article here. These are the illustrations:
My own Three Good Questions to get things started were:
- Who built the three fortresses (and are they still standing)?
- Who was Captain G.H. Ware?
- What were the 51st Light Infantry doing in that region at the time?
To which my newsletter subscribers and social media followers added the following:
- In the very top-left of the Skardo image, what is the man-made looking pyramidal structure?
- When were the sketches made?
- How did the population in this region experience being a “British province”? (Apart from understandably unwillingly. I’m curious as to the practicalities of this with regards to day-to-day life and impact on people who lived remotely.)
- Are the “glaciers far surpassing those of the Alps” still there?
- In the Skardo image, what sort of crops were being cultivated in the fields?
- What was the fate of the fort at Kartsabrusha, and where was it?
The three sketches occupied a double-page spread when they were reproduced in the Illustrated London News, the 221 accompanying words on a following page really being no more than an extended caption. They’ve turned out to be a perfect example of how interrogating even a very brief article with good questions can quickly lead research in all sorts of interesting directions.
Current anglicised spellings are often quite different to those commonly used during the 19th century, so clarifying place names is probably a good place to start. Some are more obvious than others.
- Cashmere = Kashmir
- Punjaub = Punjab
- Jailum/Behut River = Jhelum River
- Little Thibet/Bulti = Baltistan
- Kartsabrusha = see below
Baltistan is a mountainous region in what is now the Pakistani-administered territory of Gilgit-Baltistan. It constitutes a northern portion of the larger Kashmir region, which has been the subject of a dispute between India and Pakistan since partition in 1947. (6)
The “glaciers far surpassing those of the Alps” are indeed still there, in fact Baltistan has the largest glaciers outside the poles, including Baltoro Glacier, Biafo Glacier, Siachen Glacier, Trango Glacier and Godwin-Austen Glacier. (6) However, as a result of climate change, life in the region is increasingly under threat from unstable lakes formed by melting glacier ice. (7)
Kartsabrusha is something of an enigma. The only online references to the name as spelled are to the Illustrated London News article and its constituent artwork. Searches for countless spelling variations, and even a virtual navigation of the Indus, have failed to find a definite match.
About 25km north-west along the Indus from Skardo is the village of Basho, with another settlement called Khar Basho situated down a valley about 1.5km to the west. My best guess — and it’s no more than that — at the location of the Kartsabrusha fort is an outcrop on the north side of Basho.
The other two fortresses (in the Skardo image) are easier to identify. The larger one on the right is Skardu Fort, also known as Kharpocho (meaning “The King of Forts”), which was built towards the end of the 16th century by Ali Sher Khan Anchan and is today a tourist attraction. The smaller building on the level ground in the centre of the image is Dogra Fort, an 1840s addition by Zorawar Singh. It was destroyed during the First Kashmir War of 1947. (8)
The pyramidal structure in the Skardo image appears to be the upper part of a Buddhist stupa, although drawn at an exaggerated scale. I haven’t found any stupas in that area still standing, although the importance of Buddhism in the spiritual lives of past inhabitants is demonstrated by the 9th-century carvings at Manthal Buddha Rock.
The crops being grown in the Skardo valley were likely to have been wheat and barley. (9)
The question about how the region’s population experienced being a British province is one that I’m not going to attempt to respond to here, because such a big question deserves an answer that’s beyond the scope of this series. However, further reading on the subject might include Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire by Priya Satia (Penguin Books, 2022) and An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor (Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2016.)
As for Captain G.H. Ware, he was born George Henry Hibbert in Edinburgh on 9th November 1834 to Samuel Hibbert and Charlotte Wilhelmina Murray (Samuel’s second wife. She died in 1835.)
Samuel Hibbert added the patronym “Ware” on 8th March 1837. He was a medical doctor, geologist, antiquarian, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. (5) In George’s army records his surname is recorded as either Ware or Hibbert Ware, but elsewhere tends to be hyphenated as Hibbert-Ware.
In 1882, Mary Clementina Hibbert-Ware (wife of Samuel’s eldest son, Titus) published 250 copies of The Life and correspondence of the late Samuel Hibbert Ware.
George Henry Hibbert Ware joined the British army as an ensign in the 97th Regiment of Foot on 6th June 1854, became a lieutenant on 3rd November 1854 and a captain on 21st December 1855. (1) Serving in the Crimean War, he was at the siege and fall of Sevastopol from 20th November 1854 and was severely wounded during a Russian sortie on the night of 30th August 1855. (1) “…having been ordered out with a party under Captain Brinkley to retake a sap and bring in the wounded who were lying under the enemy’s rifle-pits, which duty he was performing in a gallant manner, when he received a severe wound which obliged him to retire. This officer did duty in the trenches… under trying circumstances, in a most unflinching manner.” (3)
After being repatriated to Britain, he exchanged into the “51st (The 2nd Yorkshire West Riding) or The King’s Own Light Infantry Regiment” on 5th September 1856. Detachments of the regiment served during the Indian Mutiny (India’s First War of Independence) between 1857 and 1859, and the whole regiment took part in the Ambela/Umbeyla Campaign of 1863. (10)
Six and half months before setting out on the Ambela Campaign, George married Maria Julia Bayly on 2nd April 1863 in Rawalpindi. The regiment by that time was stationed at Peshawar.
It seems likely that George made his three sketches while the regiment was on patrol during the summer of 1864.
The Commander in Chief of the British Army in India accepted George’s request to retire on 22nd October 1864. His retirement became official on 14th March 1865 and he received the full value of his commission. (2)
After leaving the army George relocated his family to Canterbury on New Zealand’s South Island, where they stayed until returning to England and making a new home in Cheltenham in 1875. George and Maria had six daughters and one son together. George died in Exmouth, Devon, on 27th November 1877 at the age of 43. Maria survived him by another fifteen years.
The University of Manchester Library holds a number of letters from Captain Hibbert Ware written during his time in the Crimea, along with a variety of other family papers. He also seems to have invented, “an improved apparatus for shifting points on railways from an engine or train in motion.” (4)
If you know or discover any more about any of the people and places mentioned in this post, or if you’d like to suggest further questions, please do tell me via the comments below.
Sources:
1. Hart’s New Annual Army List 1865.
2. The Edinburgh Gazette 17th March 1865.
4. The London Gazette, 3rd March 1865.
5. Wikipedia (with references), Samuel Hibbert Ware.
6. Wikipedia (with references), Baltistan.
7. Reuters, Mountain villages fight for future as melting glaciers threaten floods, Akhtar Soomro and Charlotte Greenfield, 22nd November 2023.
8. Wikipedia (with references), Skardu Fort.
9. J.R. Witcombe, The distribution of cropping systems in northern Pakistan, Agro-Ecosystems, Volume 3, 1976, Pages 285-290, ISSN 0304-3746, https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3746(76)90131-1.
9. National Army Museum, 51st (2nd Yorkshire West Riding), or The King’s Own Light Infantry Regiment.